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How many words you learn per year (avg) | ||
Tags: Poll | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4871 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes  Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 73 of 229 07 May 2015 at 5:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Mutatis mutandis to account for the different set of languages, the above applies for me as well. A bit more detail on how my (totally unscientific and not even well documented) guesses work: I've done dictionary headword sampling, and for German, a language that I understand roughly as well as the four Germanic languages I've learned in the past five years, I estimate that I know a meaning for about 8,000 of the words contained in a portable dictionary. Since obscure words that do not appear in such a dictionary are also words (and I know a lot of obscure words, since I consume a lot of media about science and linguistics) I roughly ( roughly! ) estimate that I know 10,000 new words in Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish. (I'm not even sure whether I started Swedish before or after 5 years ago). So that's 40,000. I also started Korean, Japanese and Cantonese in the past 5 years. I don't know many words in any of those languages. Off the top of my head, I'll guess I have about 700 words in each. That gives 42,000. Since I've been living the past 5 years in the USA, I estimate conservatively that I've learned at least 500 words of English. Among the 13 other languages that I study, I guess that my vocabulary has slowly built up, as I've done occasional-to- regular reading and listening in all of them at some point. I'll guess 250 words * 13 languages for another 3250. The total estimate is 45750/5 = 9150 words per year (Plus or minus 4000, the fudge factor is strong in this one), hence the vote. Edited by robarb on 07 May 2015 at 5:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5242 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 74 of 229 07 May 2015 at 6:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
First of all, I want to thank @iguanamon for preventing me from penning a nasty rejoinder to what I feel was an unwarranted personal attack. But I'll let sleeping dogs lie. Secondly, I have to thank those posters who have explicitly explained how they arrived at their very high figures. What I have seen so far is that these figures are guesses. That's fine. But it does tell me that nobody actually keeps track methodically of the new words they learn. Nobody has actually written down the 8000 words learned in a year. I would think that the work required is not justifiable. I should also point out that these figures apply only to receptive vocabulary. Thirdly, and this is where I agree totally with @iguanamon, one does not need to count words to learn a language, especially since nobody seems to actually count the words they say they learn. Aside from the basic observation that more is probably better than less, it is very difficult to prove that vocabulary determines overall performance in a language. Other measures such as time spent in a country, years of education in the language, relationships with speakers of the target language, number of pages read, hours of consumption of television, hours spent with a tutor, etc. are probably better predictors of good performance. Counting words makes the learner feel good.There is a sense of progression. There's a wow factor in being able to say "I've learned 5000 words this year". This is very good for the morale, and I support this. But what does this really mean in terms of actual ability to speak the language? I don't think it means much, but that's a whole other debate. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4161 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 75 of 229 07 May 2015 at 8:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I still have the deck with ~14,138 words, including the 10-13k I mentioned earlier (which in fact I studied in less than a year). I can upload the list on Dropbox or something, if you really want. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5120 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 76 of 229 07 May 2015 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Were you refering to my post #71? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5120 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 77 of 229 07 May 2015 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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So far, 10 out of 22 people have voted 1-1500, which is 5-7500 for the last 5 years. That would translate to, roughly, no more than 96% comprehension of popular novels. I know that with 6500 flashcards plus heaps of cognates, my comprehension of popular novels in Spanish was still just 95.X%.
Less than 7500 over 5 years sounds extremely slow to me. Either these people are counting word families, or are mis-counting, or are learning really exotic languages and/or spending only half an hour a day. And I believe some people prefer to have strong basic skills than to have broad general skills; that's a good strategy, too. Edited by smallwhite on 07 May 2015 at 12:26pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5242 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 78 of 229 07 May 2015 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I was intrigued by this post and went to have a look at the original quoted here:
I'll have to admit, with apologies, that in my thinking about words I was looking only at Western languages, especially the ones that I'm most familiar with. I did not consider character-based languages at all. I have no clue if characters can be considered individual words. So, I will amend by discussion to say that I am only referring to Western languages. That said, I did have look at the Wikipedia entry on Chinese characters and found the following quote: In Old Chinese, most words were monosyllabic and there was a close correspondence between characters and words[citation needed]. In modern Chinese, characters do not necessarily correspond to words; indeed the majority of Chinese words today consist of two or more characters.[5] Rather, a character almost always corresponds to a single syllable that is also a morpheme.[6] However, there are a few exceptions to this general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes (written with two characters), bimorphemic syllables (written with two characters) and cases where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase. If I understand this correctly, characters are not exactly words. I won't go further on this particular topic because I am out of my depth here. In passing, I should note that the productive vocabulary does not refer to having written out the word (or character) by hand, but rather having used the word in real communication. Edited by s_allard on 07 May 2015 at 2:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5048 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 79 of 229 07 May 2015 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
One of those people was me. I was basically "lowballing" the figure and taking the lowest number, because like many people, I don't really count them. Even when I use Anki I'm not counting the words, I just load up a bunch of words, phrases, movie clips, etc and try to memorise them. I suppose I could dig out a better answer, but I'm lazy and just took the lowest one. :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4721 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 80 of 229 07 May 2015 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Paul Nation argues in this article that the vocabulary needed for pleasurable reading of unsimplified texts is around 5000 word families. By "word families" he means a word + a large list of prefixes, suffixes, etc. So "go", "going", "went" all count as one item of vocabulary. In the article he also looks at three short novels. For one, 2600 words gives 95% coverage, and for the other two 2600 words gives 97% coverage. Although they are described as "short", the one I checked has 200 pages. Those of us with less than 6500 words in a language have strategies to cope. Some of us don't read. Some of us just ignore the unknown words and hope for the best. Another strategy is to read readers or children's books which would use a smaller vocabulary. These aren't all bad, and Le Petit Nicolas is an example of an enjoyable book accessible with a lower vocabulary. My preferred strategy is to use the popup dictionary on my kindle so that I can see the definition of unknown words while hardly breaking my flow. Edited by Jeffers on 07 May 2015 at 2:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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